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Fiction break!
It has been astoundingly cold for several days, with night temperatures in the single digits. Winter is making up for lost time.
Our windows are old and they rattle; we cover them with heat-shrink plastic film in the winter, for insulation, and the wind gets into the leaky sashes and inflates the air chamber between the plastic and the glass. The plastic rustles, puffs in and out as if the window is breathing.
It's very disconcerting when I walk through the house in the dark at night.
My sleep cycle has been severely disrupted, during this holiday weekend, and I foresee difficulty going back to work tomorrow. Meanwhile, until last night, I was having a frustrating time in other respects as well - my interactive fiction project has ground to a halt.
I don't have a clear scheme of how to get the reader from point A to point B. Although the medium makes the story episodic, by necessity, there needs to be some plan of action, some way to keep the general plot moving forward. This becomes trickier given that the reader, not the author, is making some of the protagonist's decisions. If I require that a particular episode take place because it'll be needed later, I have to find a way to guide the reader to that episode somehow, and at approximately the right time in the general order of things.
I also have a lot of legwork to do - mundane descriptions of some information necessary to the story - when what I really want to do is skip to the fun bits, just write all the "good parts." But I can't really do that until I have a better idea of the overall sequence than I do now. Otherwise I'll make continuity errors.
Last night, after two days of spinning my wheels in this fashion, I gave up for a while and sat down to actually write something. I cooked up 7400 words of very silly fanfic (to my mind, if it uses recognizable pop-culture characters I didn't create, it's fanfic). Then, today, I took two fragments I'd had sitting around and wrote short stories around each of them, to the tune of about 2000 words each. Hooray! My weekend has been saved.
I admit I'm reluctant to link to "The Flowers of Tiresias" - the fanfic - here. First off, I don't usually write the stuff, as I dislike using other people's characters. Second, it's based on someone else's concept (it was sort of a dare), and I dislike using other people's ideas almost as much. Third, it's done in a fairly overblown fashion - I wrote it on a lark and didn't worry much about stylistic issues. In short, I consider it a piece of sheer fluff, and fluff embarrasses me.
On the other hand, the other two stories I wrote today are both fairly depressing, so maybe I'd better link to the fanfic (which is silly and cheerful) as sort of a counterweight ....
One of the two new shorts is called "Telepath, Public Garden." It's a sequel to the much-abused "Telepath, Landsdowne Street." If you haven't read the first one, you probably should do so before reading the second. The first one got some pretty harsh critiques - the story was well-crafted, people said, but the main character was so emotionally detached and, frankly, so difficult to like that it ruined the story for them. Well, I had always planned to write more stories with that character. Hopefully this new one will make her seem a little more complex, if not sympathetic.
As for the heroine in "Induction," the other new short, she has a very similar problem to my poor telepath, but deals with it in an entirely different way, and I think a sadder one. You be the judge. If you decide to read it, and the two telepath stories, tell me what road you would have chosen.
I have always operated under the principle that it is bad form to admire one's own work. It seems like pure ego to me. But I've been rereading some of my stories today. There are two stories I haven't reread since the period when I wrote them - "Codependence" and "Tale Unadorned" - and I was struck by the thought, "Hey, these are better than I thought they were."
Usually I'm intensely proud of something when I first write it. (That's the period when I try to get as many people to read it as I can - the only time I come close to pimping myself.) Then, as time passes, I get less proud of the work, eventually assuming it's junk.
It's nice to have at least two pieces I actually think age well.
But enough about that. It's time to tackle the interactive fiction again. Either that, or answer more email, or finish the mouth organ updates. So much work, so little time. Keep warm, eh?
© Columbine
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